Space Marine 2 Devs Respond To Backlash Over 4.0 Nerfs

Warhammer 40K: Space Marine 2's recent 4.0 update hasn’t gone over well with players. The new patch added a difficulty option that some players feel is too frustrating while tweaking other parts of the game to make co-op missions harder, resulting in backlash from the community. Now, the devs are promising more changes as players complain that the game isn’t as fun as before.

Space Marine 2 launched last month to rave reviews from critics and players. The sci-fi third-person shooter quickly became one of 2024's biggest games, and it’s only set to grow more as developer Saber Interactive has promised future updates that will add new features, cosmetic options, modes, missions, weapons, and more. However, players are worried about the future of Space Marine 2 as its most recent patch has nerfed co-op weapons and items, making it harder than ever to finish missions.

On October 17, Space Marine 2's 4.0 patch arrived on all platforms. It added a new co-op mission featuring a big new alien monster to kill, but it also made changes that players aren’t happy about. These include limiting how often you can collect ammo from crates, making it harder to parry enemy attacks with certain melee weapons, substantially nerfing a powerful weapon used against bosses in Operations, and lowering armor effectiveness on the Ruthless difficulty setting.

Ruthless was previously the highest difficulty setting in the game. However, 4.0 added a new Lethal difficulty setting intended to be the hardest option. But some players think it might be too impossibly hard. One reason is a new trait found in this difficulty option that requires you to stick close to your co-op buddies to regain armor. This is hard enough with a coordinated team, but is damn near impossible with randoms. And it also forces all classes to stick together and makes it harder to be a sniper or a tank.

The community is not happy about these changes. On Reddit, players have posted about how the Operations mode now feels annoying to play, even on lower difficulties, due to these changes. Others explained that they didn’t mind Saber Interactive adding in a harder difficulty option, but making the rest of the game more frustrating was a step backward for the co-op shooter.

Many have commented that these changes remind them of Helldivers 2 and its infamous nerfs that made players upset and led to community outrage.

On Steam, over 900 new negative reviews have hit Space Marine 2. It’s not enough to change the game’s overall rating, but it seems to indicate that players might start review-bombing the game.

Thankfully, the devs have already responded to the backlash and negative feedback. On October 18, Saber Interactive and publisher Focus posted a message on Twitter confirming that they were aware of all the backlash and had plans to release another patch with new balance changes “next week.”

For now, that seems to have cooled the community off as players wait to see what Saber’s next patch tweaks in Space Marine 2.

And to be fair to the developer, the patch notes for this new update did indicate that the devs found Operations “too easy” and these changes were intended to fix that. But they also included a message stating that they wouldn’t know how much more difficult they had made co-op until the update was live and in players’ hands, adding: “We will continue to monitor those changes and will continue to adjust the balance of Operations mode. This is not the last change.” Well, they were right about that last part.

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